Are you an Evangelical?
By Rick McClatchy
A few years ago, I noticed many students in my Baptist history class would get perplexed or defensive when I said Baptists were greatly influenced by the Evangelical revivals that swept across the English-speaking world during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Key figures in this movement were George Whitefield and John Wesley. The Evangelicals emphasized evangelism, global missions and compassionate actions to those in need.
Baptists were key players in the Evangelical movement. They included John Leland, the evangelist, abolitionist and religious liberty advocate, as well as William Carey, the father of the modern mission movement, who served in India.
I would tell my students I was an Evangelical who still held high the three Evangelical markers of evangelism, global missions and compassionate actions to those in need. However, my students would push back, believing an Evangelical was something else. As I listened to them, it became clear the term “Evangelical” today has another meaning to a wide cross-section of the public.
That new meaning started spreading widely around 1980. This contemporary meaning of “Evangelical” synthesized three streams of thinking:
Fundamentalism. This was a theologically conservative movement of the early 20th century that pushed back against science, psychology, socialism and modern methods of Bible study.
Christian nationalism. This is the belief America is a Christian nation that should afford preferential treatment to Christianity. Christian nationalists merge their American patriotism with Christianity so that God becomes the American deity. David Barton has widely promoted these ideas for decades, in spite of proof by scholars he made up some of the historical sources he cites.
White supremacy. This was seen most clearly in the South’s practice of slavery and segregation. Southerners saw the true America to be white. Moving forward, this attitude manifests itself through prejudice toward non-whites and non-Christians. White-only churches of the South and institutions such as Bob Jones University reflect these attitudes. While these churches and institutions might not promote murder as did the Ku Klux Klan, they practice discrimination, paternalism and tokenism.
As these three streams merged, the contemporary definition of “Evangelical” came to mean someone with a Fundamentalist theology who believes America is a Christian nation to be controlled by white Christians.
When I am asked today by an ordinary secular person if I am an Evangelical, I answer “no” because the contemporary meaning of Evangelical stands against everything I am. However, if asked by a church history scholar if I am an Evangelical, then the answer is that I am deeply influenced by the historic Evangelical practices of evangelism, global missions and compassionate actions to those in need.
I guess you can call me a “historic” Evangelical but clearly not a “contemporary” Evangelical.